San Francisco, March 25, 2014 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Odin Project, an open source website dedicated to providing free online training for beginner level web developers, is launching in beta today. The move opens up the courses to a broader group of students, who themselves will help develop the curriculum in an effort to provide the most comprehensive education possible.
Web developers who can build with Ruby on Rails and Javascript are in demand like never before, but students who are interested in learning those skills often must choose to spend more than $10,000 for a coding bootcamp or up to $200,000 for a CS degree. Alternatively, they set out on their own with limited guidance on the best way achieve the necessary education. The Odin Project is designed to give these motivated individuals with limited resources a clear path to becoming hirable web developers.
The Odin Project was named for the Norse god, whose thirst for knowledge was legendary. Fittingly, many of the existing and upcoming tools in The Odin Project have been built by a team of student volunteers, who are applying what they've learned to develop the open source project. The beta includes two critical new features: progress tracking and collaborative studying capabilities.
"This is really a huge step forward in making web development education more accessible," said Erik
Trautman, founder of The Odin Project. "Now students have a complete and free path from zero to job
and we're just getting started. The real power of this project will come from letting them identify and collaborate with peers and mentors along the way so they no longer feel like they have to learn alone."
The Odin Project curriculum includes:
● Introduction to Web Development: A brief introduction to the practice and career of web development
● Web Development 101: The basics of all the technologies needed to build websites
● Ruby Programming: The programming fundamentals in Ruby, the language built for programmer happiness
● Ruby on Rails: Rapidly develop and deploy websites using Ruby on Rails
● HTML5 and CSS3: Dive deeper and understand how to really make websites look good
● Javascript and jQuery: Make websites dynamic and smooth with Javascript and jQuery
● Getting Hired: How to get a job once you've got the skills and experience
In its early stages, The Odin Project has been incubated at Riviera Partners, a technical search and recruiting service that is dedicated to the expansion of the developer community.
"We're big believers in providing tools that help people advance their careers," said COO of Riviera Partners John Simonelli. "The Odin Project provides an invaluable service to developers, so it was a natural fit for us to host Erik as one of our Entrepreneurs in Residence. He's a very motivated person and knows how to pass on his enthusiasm to others."
For more information on The Odin Project, visit http://theodinproject.com
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